Greentext

Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.

The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.

Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.

Or military vs civilian life.

Aren't the Romulans the Russians? The Klingons always seem to just be doing random war things and were mostly just doing their own stuff, whereas the Romulans seem to have some kind of actually coherent strategy.

I never got "communist" from Star Trek. There seemed to be very limited top-down control outside the military, trade seemed to be an important backdrop, and automation largely replaced the necessity for people to fill any particular role. So what it seems like is a low-touch society where automation serves the needs of the common people, but operates within a capitalist framework. If it was communist, I think we'd see a lot more conflict between the various races, but they're largely happy with the equilibrium they've struck (outside various periods of conflict).

I think if we were to explore the Star Trek universe, we'd see a lot of corporations and whatnot controlling significant portions of the interstellar economy. But since we largely follow military and diplomatic groups, we just don't see what the rest of society looks like.